Long Test score: 35/40

Reading Check #4

4.1 Promoting Positive Affect by Barbara Frederickson

 Ed Diener’s contributions to social science:
o ratio of people’s experiences of positive to negative emotions in daily life
predicts their overall levels of subjective well – being
 Called as Positivity Ratios – ratio of people’s good to bad feelings
 Depression, Marriage – Happy: 5-to-1; Sad: Less than 1-to-1
 Magic ration: 5 good feelings : 1 bad feeling
o Positive and negative affect are not mere opposites
 Positivity offset – explains the ratios of doing well and doing badly
o Adaptive bias that motivates people to get up in the
morning and approach novelty with curiosity rather than
fear.
o Negative states hold more sway than positive states
 Negativity Bias
o brain processes negative information more than positive
ones
o Evolutionary adaptivity (survival)

 Broaden-and-Build Theory by Ed Diener of positive emotions

o Broadens people’s thought and action repertoires
o Widens the scope of attention
o Forecasts future positive emotions

Increasing Positivity Ratios

Flourishing – growth, goodness, well-being, generativity, resilience
Languishing and flourishing up to 11:1 but greater than 4:1(4:1 < 11:1)
To attain flourishing- increase people’s positivity ratios
Negativity Bias – assures efforts to decrease denominator holds great promise
Negative emotions- appropriate and useful
Rumination – mental habit that can prolong feelings of sadness and increase a person’s
odds of falling prey to depression
Savoring - represents capacity to willfully generate, intensify, and prolong one’s
enjoyment of positive events.
Effects:
Fascination – draw people’s attention involuntarily
Extent – provide sufficient scope and richness to fully occupy people’s
attention

1.) Find Positive Meaning

 Making ordinary things extraordinary
Finding the good
Counting Blessings

2.) Be open – practicing present-moment awareness

Indicators of openness: inquiry and other-focus
Mindfulness – awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the
present moment, and non-judgmentally, to things as they are.

Mindfulness components:– accepting perspective on present experience

focusing on the present moment(self-regulation of attention)
being experientially open(curiosity and acceptance)

Chippy activity

Being open increase positive emotions and positivity ratio, people’s awareness
Connection between openness and increased positivity
Loving-kindness meditation – cultivates positive emotions and openness
Mindfulness meditation – increase openness
Another way: reduce certain habits of mind that tend to constrain and
compartmentalize experience.
3.) DO GOOD
Help others – show acts of kindness, share blessings
4.) BE SOCIAL
Good social relations are a necessary condition for happiness

4.2 – Emotion Regulation

Emotion Regulation – refers to how we try to influence which emotions we have, when we have
them, and how we experience and express these emotions. (still confused with definition)

EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION

Emotion – refers to an astonishing array of happenings.
Features:
1.) What gives rise to emotions
2.) Constituent elements
a. Experiential aspect of emotion
3.) Malleability
a. More likely to use reappraisal or antecedent focused
sstrategies
Hedonistic- for pleasure
All three features: “Modal Model” of emotion – heuristic
 Situation-attention-appraisal-response sequence
 Specifies a sequence of processes involved in emotion generation

Emotion Regulation – processes by which we influence which emotions we have

 Regulation by emotion
o Coordination of diverse response systems
 Regulation of emotions (more sensible)
o Refers to the heterogeneous set of process by which
emotions are themselves regulated.

Emotion Regulation Strategies

Five families of emotion regular processes: Process model
 Situation selection
 situation modification
 attentional deployment
 cognitive change
 response modulation